Valentin Diaconov (b. 1980, Moscow) is a curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. He is a Candidate of Cultural Studies. He is the author of numerous texts on art published in the newspapers Kommersant and Vremya Novostei, the magazines ArtChronika, Iskusstvo, and Frieze, and the online press Artinfo.com, ArtGuide, Raznoglasiya, etc. In 2012, Diaconov curated Philosophy of the Common Task at Perm State Art Gallery and showed his performance-tour A Piece of Europe in a Winter Garden at the 2nd Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg. In 2014, he curated the exhibition Detective at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. His curatorial projects also include: OGLYANAZ by MishMash duo at Roza Azora Gallery and Volume Two at the New Wing of Gogol House. Diaconov’s exhibition projects at Garage include: Congo Art Works: Popular Painting (with Sammy Baloji, Iaroslav Volovod, and Bambi Ceuppens, 2017), Juergen Teller. Zittern auf dem Sofa (with Andrey Misiano and Kate Fowle, 2018), The Fabric of Felicity (with Iaroslav Volovod and Ekaterina Lazareva, 2018), Rasheed Araeen. A Retrospective (with Nick Aikens, Iaroslav Volovod and Kate Fowle, 2019), Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture, 1966–1985 (with Kaspars Vanags, Andrey Misiano, and Sasha Obukhova, 2019), and Atelier E.B. Passer-by (with Daria Bobrenko and Oksana Polyakova, 2020).
Lera Kononchuk (b. 1990) is a cultural scholar, art critic, independent curator and editor. She writes on art and culture for numerous publications, including Moscow Art Magazine, Sinii divan, and SPECTATE. Lena is the founder of the Department of Practical Affectology, a collective that studies the dynamics of changes in mass attitudes and concerns, as well as the role of technology in manipulating that dynamics. Her research interests embrace radical pedagogics, experimental para-institutional practices, and the construction of the atmospheric.
Mikhail Kurtov (b. 1983) is a philosopher, media theorist, and Candidate of Philosophical Sciences. He is the author of the books Between Boredom and Daydream. The Analytics of Cinematic Experience (2012) and Genesis of the Graphical User Interface. Toeward a Theology of Code (2014). Winner of the Andrei Bely Prize for Research in Humanities (2016).
Anatoly Osmolovsky (b. 1969) is an artist, theorist, and curator, and a leading figure in Moscow actionism of the 1990s. He is a recipient of the Kandinsky Prize for Artist of the Year (2007) and the founder of Moscow’s BAZA Institute of Contemporary Art (2012).
Yoel Regev (b. 1972), PhD (Hebrew University in Jerusalem), is an associate professor at the European University in St. Petersburg. His research focuses on the history of contemporary philosophy, speculative realism, and materialist dialectics. Regev’s publications include papers in English, Hebrew, and Russian on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alain Badiou, the methodological aspects of academic studies of Jewish mysticism, and the problems of radical secularization. He is the author of the books Coincidentology: A Short Treatise on the Method published by Translit (2015) and The Impossible and Coincidence. On the Revolutionary Situation in Philosophy by Hyle Press (2016).
Coincidence Institute is a metaorganization allowing for the coordination of theoretical and practical efforts of various groups working with coincidences. Founded in 2020, the Institute continues the work of the Coincidence International project, while embracing interdisciplinary theoretical and critical commitment (reinterpretation of truths), development of new protocols of work, and approbation of the results based on practical cases, implemented and presented via specific objects. The Institute’s Science Council decided to promote the project within the framework of contemporary art. This strategic move is inspired by the fact that, given the current state of affairs, the projects carried out by the Institute can be well accepted and recognized as “their own” by art and cultural institutions today.
Members of the Institute: Yoel Regev, Alek Petuk, Nikolay Ulyanov, Yura Plokhov, Anton Struzhkin.
BKB Group was founded in early 2019. It produces reenactments of artworks, staging of performances, and reconstruction of public events. BKB uses various methods of group work and experiments with different communication modes inside the team. According to the members of the group, “We see a contemporary art project as a collective and educational initiative aimed at transforming and teaching us. Another important aspect deals with developments in coincidence methodology and our non-creative position: today, we think that it is important to process what already exists, underpinning revolutionary intensities in the already known and reproduced. Hence our interest in reenactments and repetitions. As Gilles Deleuze noted very precisely, difference is repeated.
Performance participants: Alek Petuk, Arseny Balakirev, Lyuba Yagdanova, Antonina Yurchenko, Yegor Dvinyanin, Anna Brandush, Joe Featherwind.
Other BKB members: Tanya Sukhareva.